M2M gateway: The centerpiece of future home

The online collection of information about the consumption of gas, water, electricity and data from other sensors as temperature and humidity sensors or photo-voltaic systems became highly required. At the same time, the market liberalization on smart metering brought new challenges for utility distributors and telecommunication operators. Likewise, online data collection is crucial for increasing efficiency of energy consumption and reducing environmental impact as well. The communication concept which is able to fulfil mentioned requirements is called Internet of Things or Machine-to-Machine. During these days many industry bodies are trying to take a piece of this M2M cake, especially in a home environment. Since such an intelligent house is equipped by many different sensors and home automation systems, it is important to come up with a solution which will be able orchestrate all elements and provide end-users with one single management interface. The smart home gateway is one of possible solutions which enables the communication with various types of devices /sensors and provides common networking features like residential IP router as well. This paper demonstrates the concept of our smart home gateway which acts as a multipurpose enabler and communicates information from connected sensors to the end user through the developed middleware application. Since it is expected that the number of sensors in smart homes will be enormous it is appropriate to optimize the transmission of generated data between sensors and user applications. Therefore, our gateway implements a data aggregation scheme and respects the requirements defined by Home Gateway Initiative.